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In television’s early days, every show had a kind of zany added excitement, like home movies. While Hollywood buried all its mistakes discreetly in the cutting room, behind the small screen’s dimly glowing surface flickered intimations of chaos. Television was vital and hectic and candid, while technicians scurried like Lilliputians to bring the erratic beast under control.

With video tape, they succeeded. Television is calmer now, and better-protected against itself. Indiscretions are blipped out routinely, and no producer need toss fitfully in his sleep, dreaming of Kenneth Tynan. (Tynan once stunned British viewers with an unexpected, but very basic, Anglo-Saxonism) Even so, there a few hardy evangelists, still preaching the gospel of liver performances. One such is Erwin Nicholson, producer of the CBS daytime serial, "The Edge of Night".

"To me," says Nicholson, "television was never meant to be a method of rebroadcasting old films. It was supposed to be a medium all its own, and it was intended to be live, as it was in the beginning."

"That’s not much of a gospel; still, Nicholson is convinced his show benefits from being live, and the ratings tend to support him. Of the networks’ 16 daytime serials, "Edge" and "As the World Turns", another CBS entry, are the only ones not on tape. " World" is Number One in national popularity, and "Edge" is a respectable Number Two. Novelty isn’t the reason, obviously; both shows went on the air April 2, 1956, and have been cranking out about 260 episodes a year ever since.

Originally, all the serials were live, but when video tape replaced murky kinescopes as an alternative, most of them switched. Nicholson thinks the change was ill-advised, and that most producers went along with it for the wrong reasons. "They felt they could perfect things by going to tape," he maintains, "and when a scene didn’t work, they’d shoot it again. Personally, I don’t think it worked out that way."

That much is incontestable. Not long ago, during a taping of NBC’s "Another World", an actor forgot to push the drawer-release button on a filing cabinet. The cabinet jammed, the tape was stopped and the sequence played over, all at a cost of $500. More extensive editing could have cost thousands, and at those prices, tapes rarely get stopped. In theory, a scene could be polished and repolished, but it hardly ever happens. Since that’s so, wonders Nicholson, why put a show on tape in the first place?

Put it another way. What’s the sense of not taping it? With Nicholson, it’s a matter of adrenalin. "We have 80 people working here," he says. "Actors, technicians, stagehands and production people. When we’re on video tape, there’s not exactly a lackadaisical approach, but there is a feeling that, well, if we don’t get on the air at 3:30, we can always delay it to 3:32 or 3:34. But if they see that second hand rushing around to 3:30, and they know that some 200 stations are waiting for this show live, everything starts working. Without sounding sadistic about it, I think it shakes people up. And the result is a much better show."

Actors who like going live sometimes compare it to the stage, where the same cardiac psychology prevails. But serials are even more harrowing in a way, since the scripts change every day, and an actor faces a withering succession of deadlines. Donald May, Adam Drake on "The Edge of Night", believes the tension of going live is an essential part of his performance, sharpening him in the face of a dulling routine.

"I’d quit if the show were taped," he declares. "We work in a medium that has none of the advantages of the stage and none of the advantages of film. Why take away the one advantage we’ve got?"

Occasionally, for production reasons, even the live shows go on tape. In New York,, for example, children under 3 years old may not perform live. Their scenes are taped in advance and dropped into the shows at air time. Vacationing actors often tape scenes for use in their absence; and pre-emptions, for special events like an Apollo splashdown, are usually followed by several days of taping for reasons of economy.

The logic of taping after pre-emptions is based on the fact that cast calls for each episode are issued roughly two weeks in advance. Once an actor is called for a show day, he must be paid for it, so it wouldn’t make business sense simply to take the pre-emption day off and move every succeeding episode back a day. The producer would then find himself paying two casts every day. To avoid that, the cast tapes a show on the pre-emption day, and continues taping, every day, one day ahead of air time, until the cast calls issued prior to pre-emptions have been exhausted.

Some actors consider taping a irritating distractions, whatever the circumstances. "I don’t like it hanging over my head," says Don Hastings, Bob Hughes on "As the World Turns". "Something goes wrong, and the first thing that flashes through your mind is ‘Are they going to stop it?’ Once you think that, you’re out of the scene.

Eileen Fulton, who plays Lisa Shea, disagrees emphatically. Once, she recalls, she was having an on-screen telephone conversation with an actor on another part of the set. The audio connection failed, and she couldn’t pick up her sues. "In a situation like that, the only thing you can do is watch the prompter," she says. "When it stops turning, you know it’s your turn to speak. But this is not creative atmosphere. Sometimes the audience will tell us, ‘Oh, we like it live. We like to see the mistakes.’ I think that’s really kind of bloodthirsty --- like throwing the Christians to the lions."

Most actors who work live consider it a gritty test of their poise as professionals. Often, improvisation is so natural to them that a viewer isn’t even aware when a show wobbles off course. On "Edge of Night" recently, actress Teri Keane, as Martha Marceau, started to choke, during a scene with Mandel Kramer, who plays her husband. They were in their living room at the time, and each had a drink. During a commercial break, Miss Keane took her glass off-camera to soothe her troubled throat, and neglected to bring it back. When the scene resumed, Kramer reached for his own glass, but Miss Keane, afraid she might need it headed him off.

"That’s mine," she snapped.
"Where’s mine?" asked the puzzled Kramer.
Miss Keane deftly changed the subject.

Barring a catastrophe, even the taped serials make a habit of playing over adversity. Occasionally, though, events conspire against them. Once, on ABC’s " All My Children", taping was interrupted when a fog-making machine belched out of control, blanketing the studio.

In general, "Edge of Night" has been spared that kind of embarrassment, although the late John Larkin, the original Mike Karr, once found himself stymied by a recalcitrant door. Larkin, who was due on-camera, wrestled with it gamely, and then, as the set quivered alarmingly, raced to another door and came bursting out of a closet with Clark Kent-ish aplomb.

Another incident involved Mandel Kramer, who plays a tough police chief. Kramer had trapped a gunman in a liquor store, and was ready for a thunderous, bottle-shattering shootout, the bottles having been wired to fly apart in the gunplay. At the peak of the scene, the lights flashed off on cue, and Kramer started blasting away, but in utter, deafening silence. "My guns didn’t work," he explains. "Then the special-effects man blew a fuse and the bottles started shooting back at me." Kramer plugged away noiselessly, and the gunman finally fell dead.

"As the World Turns" hasn’t gone untouched, either. Actress Helen Wagner has spent 15 years playing Nancy Hughes, most of them within a casserole’s throw of the Hughes kitchen. She was going through the motions of frying chicken one day, when the oven timer, which shouldn’t have been connected in the first place, set up a nerve-jangling whine. Miss Wagner turned every dial she could find, but the timer droned on infuriatingly. Finally someone said,, "Come on, Mom, let it go," and the actress, composure slightly askew, beat a fretful retreat.

Viewers notice these things, but don’t seem to mind. If anything, the flaws in a performance only enhance live television’s compelling illusion of transparency, the sense of looking through a window that opens, miraculously, on other people’s lives. Ultimately, perhaps, no taped serial can come as exquisitely close to that illusion as the shows that put themselves on the line, utterly and completely, at the same fatal moment each day.

[This article first appeared in TV GUIDE, August 7, 1971. Reprinted without permission.]